The Layered Memories of Alessandra Testa

This article was originally published on Hue & Eye.

About Alessandra Testa

Alessandra Testa was born in Milan in 1980. Her’s an interesting creative story, as Alessandra doesn’t define herself as an artist (yet). Although, as she told us during a very spontaneous phone interview, she feels, since she was a little girl, the urge to explore how to fill her spare time with artistic hobbies, such as dance or theatre. Despite this, her interests grew towards a different career, so she became a criminal defense lawyer. The years passed by, while Alessandra had to focus quite exclusively on her challenging job. But one day, as she was walking next to her office, an art gallery caught her attention. It was a photography gallery exhibiting digitally manipulated images made of juxtaposed layers. At first glance, she only felt attracted to those colorful artworks, but as soon as she discovered their high cost, she started nurturing the idea of doing some by herself. But again, her demanding job took most of her time for her to fulfill this aim.

About Alessandra Testa’s Creative Path

It all re began on a sleepless night while she was in Miami for a holiday. Alessandra was suffering from jetlag and couldn’t sleep, so she grabbed her phone and started playing around with some images she took those days of the American city. The more she was doing so, the more she discovered new tricks and tools to develop the resulting creative ideas she has been thinking of so far. The timing was the right one, as Alessandra was shortly launching her new law firm and was looking for original art to hang on the wall of her brand new office. Motivated by her first creative attempts, she kept layering photographs, and this is how she created her first work Miami.

When she got back to Italy, despite being reimmersed in her lawyer-look, she was now convinced in keeping her creative hobby alive. As for today, Alessandra created several artworks with a recognized style of vivid digital manipulation of her photographs.

During our conversation, we asked what pushed her to do so, and she straightly explained how she aims at creating collages of her memories to remind her of all the joyful things that took place in her life. Also, the objective of decorating her home with personal, joyful artwork is what kept her in doing so. The reason why she never thought of taking a step further in her art is probably this one: to keep it as a diary to herself. Today she has to withdraw this thought as she agreed about being part of a creative collective such as st-Art.

When motivated by founder and curator Carlo Tozzi to deepen her artistic skills, she came to Amsterdam for few days to know more about it and, together with the st-Art team, to examine in-depth her portfolio of works. Alessandra could then begin considering her passionate hobby as more structured and is today very capable of taking her art seriously. Alessandra indeed well explains as her artistic process is as an urge to depict her fears and emotions. She dreads the concept of emptiness, both figurative and emotional, and this is what pushes her to create collages of works filled with personal feelings and memories. She also wishes to arise in the viewer to search for its own thrill, as she suggests to dig all the juxtaposed layers and details to discover eventually some emotional connection.